The present invention relates to the transmission of electronic communications over communication networks, and more particularly, to viewing attachments to electronic communications.
During the past decade, electronic mail (“e-mail”) has become an indispensable tool for facilitating business and personal communications. Through computer networking systems such as local-area networks (“LAN”), wide-area networks (“WAN”), and the world-wide web (“WWW”), network users can send and receive notes, messages, letters, etc., to communicate with others who are in the same office or perhaps in remote locations across the world. Most e-mail application programs allow a user to attach a file to be sent along with a message as an attachment. Attachment files might include word processing documents, graphics files, audio or video, multimedia presentation files, computer-aided drawing (“CAD”) files, mathematical equation editor files, spreadsheet reports, etc. A recipient will receive the e-mail message plus any attached files, which may then be opened if the recipient's computer has the appropriate application software. In many applications, it is preferable to send documents through e-mail attachments instead of a facsimile because the recipient can then print an exact replica of the original file. For long-distance communications, it is also less costly to send documents via e-mail as compared with a facsimile.
Although many currently available e-mail application programs enable a user to send attachments as part of an e-mail communication, there are problems that recipients often encounter when receiving e-mail attachment files. If a recipient's computer does not have the particular user application software that corresponds with the attachment file, the recipient will not be able to access the attachment. For example, if a sender attaches a CAD document created with CAD software for transmission in an e-mail communication, the recipient might not be able to access or view the file unless the recipient has installed the same CAD software as in the sender's computer. Considering the number of different software vendors that supply software for word processing, graphing, drawing, video editing, CAD, etc., it can be quite common for a recipient to be unable to open an attached document in an e-mail communication. Even if the recipient's computer system supports a particular vendor's software, the recipient might still not be able to access or view the file if the transmitted document was created on a more recent version of this software. In order to view the document, the recipient must then request the sender to save the attachment file in a different format that is compatible with the recipient's software and re-transmit the e-mail communication.
Some e-mail application programs include “quick viewer” features for the recipient of an e-mail attachment file to view the file. These e-mail application programs store viewer applets for many of the popular software packages that are commonly used. The viewer applets are executable files that allow the recipient to view, but not open or edit, a file that was received, when a user selects the received file. While the “quick viewer” feature may allow the recipient to view the majority of transmitted files, there may still be file types that are not supported by the viewer. Particularly, the “quick viewer” may not support specialty software that does not have widespread use. Even with widely-used software packages, the documents composed with the newest version of the software may not be accessible by the “quick viewer” when new versions or upgrades of a software vendor are released. Because of the number of different software packages that are commonly available, it would be impractical to install an upgrade of the e-mail application program each time a commonly-used software package is upgraded. These problems significantly reduce the benefits of e-mail systems and may negatively affect both the sender's and recipient's productivity when engaging in electronic mail communications.